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How-to: Get your website Christmas Ready

According to a study by ChannelAdvisor, almost three quarters of retailers get over 20% of their annual sales during the holiday period. With Christmas right around the corner, we’ve put together a toolkit for getting your website and marketing materials ready for the season. So whether you’re looking to send out a smart Christmas marketing campaign or add some sparkle to your homepage, this is the post for you.

Website

Aiconica have a really easy graphic maker you can use for free to create your own seasonal icons. Once you’ve chosen an icon (they have a nice selection, from candy canes to little gingerbread men) you can change the colours to fit with your website colour scheme in a couple of clicks, right from the page. When you’re ready, you can upload your icons to your website using this guide – or this one for responsive pages! You can read more on why icons are so great and how to best utilise them on your website here.

Photos are another way to add a touch of festivity to your website. Pexels have a great selection of winter stock photos you can use for your site graphics or homepage background.

Promotions

A study by Adroll found that the click-through rate of online ads grew by 23.53% on average during the 2015 Christmas shopping season – so it’s a perfect time to use ads and promotions to increase your website traffic and sales.

Creating immediacy is a fantastic way to increase conversions. Susan Gunelius advises that these form part of your call to action: ‘Creating a perception of urgency can be as easy as choosing the right words to use in your copy. Don’t be tempted to overload your marketing messages with words that suggest immediacy, though. Instead, place these words strategically within your calls to action.’

You can add a call to action button as part of your promotional graphic like the above example. Link it to your targeted page so that your customers will land directly on the promotional area of your website. Promotional graphics work best in high-traffic areas such as your homepage – check out this guide to find out how to start linking your images (or this one for responsive pages).

Vouchers

Vouchers are perfect as a special gift to your loyal customers, as part of a seasonal promotion, or as an added extra in your online store over Christmas. Canva have a great selection of ready made layouts which you can edit in any way you like to follow your website and branding. You can set up a variety of promotional codes through your online store with Moonfruit – for example a specific discount across your customer’s shopping basket or free shipping over the holiday period. You can read more about creating promotion codes for your online shop here.

Do you have any tips for creating seasonal graphics? Which channels have worked best for your promotions over the Christmas period? Tell us below!